A Corpus-based Study *
5. Discussion and conclusion
Gathering all information from the previous discussion, the senses of buah can be summarized in Figure 1 below, detailing the possible metaphorical extensions between them.
Siaw-Fong Chung
Figure 1: Uses of Buah and Their Semantic Extensions Buah
General ‘Things’
Event
System PRODUCT
Product of Art/Writing Product of Thoughts/
Intellect
Artifact Product of Nature
Furniture
Tools
Transportation Small Objects Telecommunication
Building
Organization
Place Area
Numeral Classifier Buah in Malay
In Figure 1, buah is suggested to be a classifier that categorizes nouns denoting a core meaning of ‘product.’ The types of ‘products’ include ‘product of arts/writing’
(article, newspaper, pamphlet), ‘product of thoughts/intellect’ (thoughts, philosophy, decision), ‘product of nature’ (cave, stone), ‘artifact’ and two other weakly linked (dotted arrows) ‘products’─‘event’ (as a product of an action: e.g. unification is a product of unifying effort) and ‘system’ (as a product of a set of rules and beliefs). In addition,
‘system’ is also linked to ‘organization,’ where rules and beliefs are put into practice. At the same time, ‘organization’ is a metonymic extension of ‘building,’ alongside ‘place’ and
‘area.’ ‘Building,’ which forms a separate category of meaning by itself, is also part of an
‘artifact.’ The other members of ‘artifacts’ include ‘furniture’ (cupboard, chair, stool),
‘transportation’ (car, train, lorry), ‘small object’ (photo album, bag), ‘telecommunication’
(computer, telephone), and ‘tool’ (gadget, tool). In addition to these categories, there is also a group of ‘general things,’ constituted by non-specific collective nouns such as entity, thing, and asset. (Note that further relationships can also be established between these senses─from ‘place’ to ‘area’ (metonymy), from ‘furniture’ to ‘building’ (partonymy or part-whole relation), etc.)
From the establishment of relationships, it is not hard to imagine how the compound nouns buah dada ‘breasts’ and buah pinggang ‘kidneys’ can be extended to buah pemikiran ‘fruit of thoughts,’ and later from ‘fruit of thoughts’ to an ‘event’ (e.g. forum, discussion, and negotiation).
From what has been studied so far, we discovered that not only is buah used with names of artifacts, such as buildings, machines, artwork, and organizations, it is also used with nouns that are loanwords (at least 50% of them were such nouns, excluding those that could not be found). A quick reference to a classic Malay manuscript dating from the 1370s from the Malay Concordance Project online shows that both the ‘fruit’ reading and the numeral classifier buah existed, but its primary use is to classify terms such as kapal
‘ship,’ rumah ‘house,’ gunung ‘mountain,’ gua ‘cave,’ khemah ‘camp,’ kolam ‘pond,’ and perahu ‘sampan.’7 These same nouns are still used with buah in modern Malay. However, an additional concern of this work is that when new technologies, such as computer, radio, and video camera (which are also now used with buah), appeared after the 1370s, what kinds of mechanisms decide whether they should be classified using buah? The results herein suggest that there must be a certain semantic function for buah so that things that did not exist in the 1370s can be used with buah in modern Malay.
Figure 1 provides a hint that the artifacts for telecommunication are likely to be grouped using buah. Furthermore, previous results suggest that a classifier-needing loanword is likely to be grouped using buah as well. These results are not without doubt
7 http://mcp.anu.edu.au/
Siaw-Fong Chung
because CDs and DVDs are not grouped with buah but, rather, with keping (for flat, thin objects; cf. Table 2). With the findings obtained so far, we postulate the following two mechanisms, which may help answer the above question. These mechanisms inform us about the conditions that might have determined the choice of buah as a numeral classifier for classifier-needing new terms when they were first used in modern Malay.
These two mechanisms are given in (11) below.
(11) a. First, when a loanword that is foreign to the culture of Malay enters its vocabulary and this noun needs a classifier, buah will serve as a default classifier if this foreign object does not have particular shapes that can be classified by other classifiers, such as keping (CD, DVD, paper, etc.).
Therefore, the other classifiers emphasizing the shape (and/or size) of the entity will serve as the ‘filter’ before deciding whether buah can apply to these foreign products.
b. Second, products of nature, artifact, and abstract creation of intellect, as well as organization or system, are generally used with buah. These products are often (but not necessarily) big.
Using the above two mechanisms, we are able to explain why there are seemingly dissimilar nouns classified using buah. An answer based on the definition of ‘classifying things with indefinite shapes and types’ is not sufficient to explain the rich cultural meaning of buah. The cultural part of buah may also be related to solidarity, whereby foreign objects are classified separately from others (if they do not have particular shapes as a precondition). This self-and-other metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson 1999) is seen even in classifying objects.
Referring to the comment that buah has no semantic content (cf. Hopper 1986, 1991 in his comment on sa-buah), we provide two responses.8 First, it might be that Hopper was referring to the grammaticalization of sa-buah, not buah itself. It could be that buah acts more like a general classifier when used with the clitic se- in se-buah (or sa-buah as its derived form in historical texts) but not when it appears in dua buah ‘two BUAH.’ The results from this study prove that buah is definitely used for a reason. Second, using the general classifier 個 in Chinese as a comparison, we compare the characteristics of 個 with buah and observe that for almost all nouns used with the general classifier of 個 in Chinese, they can take both the general classifier and one or more non-general classifiers, as shown in example (12) below.
8 The hyphen after se- appears only when we refer to Hopper’s study. In written Malay, se- is combined with buah.
Numeral Classifier Buah in Malay
(12) a. 一 個 房子 (general)
one Class. house
‘a house’
b. 一 間 房子 (specific)
one Class. house
‘a house (emphasis on the opening of the house)’
c. 一 棟 房子 (specific)
one Class. house
‘a house (emphasis on the building of the house)’
For (12a), one can use the general classifier 個 to mean one house. (Note the necessity of adding a description when translating the phrases in example (12) because such specific meanings (as shown in (12b) and (12c)) are not expressed in the same way in English.) However, one can also substitute 個 with other classifiers, such as 間 in (12b) to emphasize the opening or 棟 in (12c) to emphasize the structure. The examples above show that 個 is indeed a general classifier that can serve as the “default-rule” (cf. Myers 2000) when someone does not know which classifier to use. For buah, however, nouns that are classified by it cannot take other classifiers to form more specific meanings.
Furthermore, Malay has another indefinite quantifier of suatu ‘one’ that serves more like a general classifier than buah (cf. Hopper 1986, 1991). Therefore, buah does not seem to be a general classifier, according to the findings of this work.9
To conclude, based on our study and investigation, the results show that buah serves a function that is important to the culture. This paper argues for the non-general-classifier’s status of buah as it does display semantic functions and many of them can be used to classify various forms of products (literal and metaphorical). In addition, this study found that buah is not only salient in terms of its cultural function but also the nouns it classifies have some characteristics in common. The grouping of loanwords by a particular classifier may reflect the self-and-other metaphor, and this aspect of the culture is seldom emphasized in literature.
As future work, the differences between buah in sebuah ‘one.BUAH’ versus dua buah ‘two BUAH’ can be carried out. There is a possibility that sebuah (but not buah) can be used interchangeably with suatu as in sebuah idea ‘one.BUAH idea’ and suatu idea
‘one idea,’ yet it cannot be multiplied to mean *dua buah idea ‘two BUAH idea.’ Whether this phenomenon is caused by the abstract nature of ‘idea’ or the grammaticization of sebuah will be an area for future research.
9 Buah is unlike suatu because they both have different constructions, where suatu is a number that means ‘one’ and buah needs another number to quantify it.
Siaw-Fong Chung
In addition, the presence and absence of buah, as Hopper (1991) has noticed, may also bring a different light to this study. Hopper found that when a noun (e.g. rumah batu
‘brick house’) is not the subject of discussion, its numeral classifier sa-buah can be dropped. He then analyzed the nouns of numeral classifiers when they appeared with or without classifiers using Givón’s measures of discourse persistence to NP (cf. Givón 1995). His results show that the appearance of the numeral classifiers “bears a striking resemblance to the emergence of an indefinite article in English.” His observation demonstrates that not only is the choice of classifier an important issue in research, but also the absence of supposedly-present classifiers can bring about a pragmatic impact on the language. Therefore, it is also worth investigating not only the presence of buah used in the newspaper genre but also their absence. These we reserve for future work.
In conclusion, arguing against the claim that buah is used to classify things that do not have definite shapes and types, this paper utilizes a corpus-based, quantitative approach through which the semantic functions of buah are presented. While most work in classifier systems (e.g. Adams & Conklin 1973, Allan 1977, Salehuddin & Winskel 2008) focuses on establishing a typology of classifiers or on discovering the semantic features of classifiers, this paper crystallizes the influence of culture in classification and explains how a grammatical system such as numeral classifier may reflect a community’s treatment of categorization. This study hopes to shed light on the cognitive importance of numeral classifiers. Study in this direction will also support a corpus-based approach where (re-)analysis through exemplars is emphasized.
Numeral Classifier Buah in Malay
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[Received 3 December 2009; revised 31 March 2010; accepted 8 April 2010]
Department of English National Chengchi University 64, Sec. 2, Zhinan Road Taipei 116, Taiwan [email protected]
Numeral Classifier Buah in Malay